A sales team I worked with last week looked, on paper, like a team that should be hitting its numbers. Every sales manager was busy from morning to evening. Effort was not the issue. Results were. Each manager carried a handful of underperforming sales representatives, and the cumulative drag had pulled first quarter revenue below the aggressive target the company had set in a declining market. The interesting part is what we found when we looked at how the team actually worked together.
Activity Is Not the Same as Progress
When I asked the sales managers how often they got together, the answer was once every six months. The rest of their time was virtual. We mapped what those in person and virtual meetings actually looked like, both as a manager team and in the sessions they ran with their representatives. The pattern was familiar. Every conversation defaulted to the numbers.
Numbers matter. They are the measure of personal success and the engine of business growth. But a meeting that is only about numbers is transactional. It does not change what the team does on Monday morning. Repeating the same review every week is the organizational equivalent of banging your head against a brick wall, and it will not reliably produce a different result.
Where the Team Was Really Spending Its Time
I introduced the co-elevation model and asked each manager where they thought they spent their time on a spectrum that ran from collaboration at one end to resistance and resentment at the other. Their candor was the breakthrough. The honest answers clustered closer to the resistance end than anyone wanted to admit.
That created a useful question to put on the table:
- How can we expect change when resistance and resentment are the dominant modes inside the leadership team?
- Why would results shift if we have not changed anything about how we work?
- Are we doing everything we can to enable our representatives to perform at a higher level, or are we managing them at a distance and hoping?
The answers were a wake up call. None of these managers were lazy or uncommitted. They had simply absorbed a way of working that prioritized busyness over impact and individual numbers over collective ownership.
The Two Drivers That Actually Move the Needle
Our research shows, time and time again, that two practices separate sales teams that grow from sales teams that stall.
- Coaching. Manager coaching, peer to peer coaching, expert coaching, and clear communications. Coaching is the mechanism that turns a number into a behavior change, and behavior change is what produces a different number next quarter.
- Strong role plays. Practiced, deliberate, realistic role plays that rehearse the conversations that matter, including the difficult ones. Role plays build the muscle memory that representatives need when they are in front of a customer who is hesitating.
Apply both with consistency, and you do not get an incremental lift. You get a multiple. The teams that operate this way report results that are an order of magnitude beyond what they were producing before.
Co-Elevation Means Owning More Than Your Own Number
We then talked about what it means to co-elevate. The shift is from each manager owning their own numbers to the manager community owning bigger collective outcomes, and being accountable not just for the results but for the behaviors that produce them. That includes coaching each other, holding each other to a higher standard, and using the same practices with their representatives.
By the end of the week the group had committed to act consciously, deliberately, and differently. Not a slogan. Specific commitments tied to specific behaviors with specific timeframes.
What This Means for Leaders
Here is the question worth sitting with. Do you own your own success only, or do you also own the success of your peers and the people who report to you? If you do not, what story are you telling yourself about why that is acceptable? You are the most important resource available to your team. As a community of leaders you can clear targets that no individual could clear alone, but only if you choose to operate that way. The status quo is comfortable, predictable, and expensive. The choice to co-elevate is uncomfortable in the short term and disproportionately rewarded in the long term.